This is not a fun blog

I’ve been away in the peaceful and sunny expanses of Cornwall and have come home to see the country is on fire. Let me start by saying that what happened in Sunderland, the murder of three girls by a young British teenage boy, is an appalling and unbelievable crime, but if anyone wanted to show their support for the families who have suffered an inconceivable loss, rioting is not it. 

There is no way that these outbursts of violence are not in some way orchestrated, but the difficulty is that there is not a figure head or organiser behind this mess, but rather a many headed hydra which has been lurking under the surface, waiting to break out. They have no particular regard for the murder of children, but they do see an opportunity when one presents, and have used the doubled edges sword of social media to make the most of it. The odious Yaxley-Yates man may well be tweeting from the safety of his sun-bed in Crete, but he’s jumping on an already moving bandwagon.

There area far larger number of people who are currently employing the word ‘but’ to tell on themselves, starting sentences with the phase ‘I’m not racist but…..’ Or ‘I don’t agree with rioting, but…’ But trust me, if someone feels the reasons behind these riots lies with asylum seekers, they’re part of the problem.

If we dare mention the word, if you want to find the roots of what’s going on, you have to look back to Brexit and the way people were whipped up into a frenzy by what try and pass for mainstream political figures, such as Boris Johnson and the odious Farage man. They tried to sell people the idea that if we left the EU, we would be able to ‘control our boarders,’ I believe the exact phrase was ‘take back control’ which hits the sloganeering right in the solar plexus. Any longer than three words and the people you want to believe you, loose focus. I’m not making this up, it’s the advice given by all marketers - three is indeed the magic number when it comes to slogans, and now you know that, you’ll see it everywhere. ‘Don’t vote weird’ anyone?

Of course, no one urging us to ‘take back control’, ever mentioned that while we where in the EU, we were under the Schengen Agreement, which stated that any asylum seekers had to ask for asylum in the first EU country they came to, which means that as we’re quite far North, we were far less of a destination for asylum seekers. Now, if they don’t want to apply to a country where they may not speak the language, English being so damn ubiquitous thanks to our history of colonisation, if they can get to the UK we no longer have the legal means to send them back to the EU, because we’re no longer their problem. No one wrote than on a bus, did they?

I am pretty sick of saying over and over again that it is far more simple to blame outsiders, than face the reality of what’s happening in your country, and yet so many people seem to endlessly fall for that despite what history tells them over and over. To give you a nice metaphor, a fable speaks of how an Indian ruler was approached by a group of Persians a couple of thousand years ago, begging for asylum. To answer them, he sent a bowl of milk full to the brim, saying that there was no more room. The leader of the Persian took three spoonfuls of sugar, stirred them into the bowl and sent it back, saying that we will not make your world worse but only better. This is why Persian food merged with Indian to produce one of the best cuisines in the world, and probably the favourite food of many of those rioting today.

If the last government had really wanted to tackle the issue of illegal migration, they could have used the billions they spent on not sending anyone to Rwanda to negotiate with the French and Calais authorities to set up an immigration centre on the other side of the Chanel, and build facilities to house people fleeing from war and oppression in a humane way, as well as supporting the processing centres here. This isn’t my idea, the French suggested it a few years back, but it was turned down. We could also allow asylum seekers to work and contribute to society, and we could return people who are not fleeing oppression. It was easier for them to sit and watch people drown instead, and then tell everyone that the state of the NHS and just about everything else in the country going down the pan is down to immigration pressure and not chronic underfunding. 

Here’s another thing we should consider - in a country which is actively making it harder and harder for people to be come parents and with a quickly aging and ailing population, despite what people tell you we are in desperate need of young, economically active and educated people coming to our country. In the next few years, the drop in the birthrate is going to hit the education system, witch schooling going from being over subscribed to under subscribed, and the NHS cannot make up its staffing shortfall with UK born graduates, because there are simply not enough of them. 

What we need is calm, well regulated and swift routes for people who mostly want to go back to their home countries, come here and work and live to support our economy, and the people stopping that from happening are not just the rioters. They are the ‘mainstream’ actors who have used a right wing narrative as a cure all cover up for their own failings, and all those people who have fallen for their easy hate mongering. The people who feel they have been ‘left behind’ have been left behind by the failings of our past governments, and the best way they can continue to be left behind, is to do exactly what they are doing.